Contents

Life

Born in Cork the
son and heir of one of the most prosperous merchants of that city,
Alderman John Thompson,
who held, amongst other offices, that of Mayor in 1794. William inherited the small
trading fleet and landed estate near Glandore, West Cork after his father's death
in 1814. Rejecting the role of absentee landlord commonly led by
those of a similar situation, William based his living quarters on
the estate and despite many travels, invested much time with the
tenants on the estate introducing agricultural innovations,
services and education for children aimed at improving the welfare
and prosperity of the families present.

Victim of weak health from an early age, Thompson became a
non-smoker, teetotaller and vegetarian for the last 13 years of his
life. These abstemious habits, he explained helped him in
concentrating on his reading and writing. Nonetheless, by the 1830s
he was suffering from a chest affliction that finally killed him on
28 March 1833. He had never married and left no direct heir.

Ideas

An enthusiastic student of the writers and ideas of the Enlightenment, particularly Condorcet, Thompson became a convinced
egalitarian and democrat. His support for the French
Revolution earned him the label of "Red Republican" from Cork
society and his support for advocates of Catholic emancipation in
elections further alienated him from the rest of his wealthy
Protestant kith and kin.

Thompson was greatly impressed by the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham
with whom he corresponded and established a friendship, later
staying at the English philosopher's house for several months in
1821-22 while visiting London. As well as Bentham, Thompson read
and corresponded with other utilitarian contemporaries such as James Mill and was
influenced, both positively and negatively, by William Godwin
and Thomas Malthus. His desire to overcome the
limitations of Godwin's "intellectual speculations" and Malthus's
"mechanical speculations" led him to propose a new synthesis: social science - Thompson was the first to
introduce this term - would combine political economy's concern
with scientific materialism with utilitarianism's concern with
rational morality.

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Contribution to political
economy

It was the contrasting ideas of Godwin and Malthus that spurred
Thompson into the project of research into the role of distribution
in political
economy that led him to London and, in 1824, the publication of
"An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth..."
(see biblio. for full title). Thompson had also become acquainted
with the work of the French utopian socialists including Charles
Fourier, Henri Saint-Simon and the economist Sismondi.

In the Inquiry Thompson follows the line of the labour theory of value put forward by Adam Smith. However he
characterises the appropriation of the lions share of surplus value
by the capitalist owner of the tools of production as exploitation.
He rejects the Malthus/Mill proposition that any increase in the
wage of the workers can only result in their further immiseration,
noting the self-serving nature of this theory for capitalists
pressing for legislation to outlaw workers efforts to raise their
wages. By applying the utilitarian principle of "the greatest good
for the greatest number" to the existing and possible alternative
schemes of distribution, Thompson comes down on the side of an
egalitarian distribution of the product.

One of Thompson's colleagues in the Cooperative movement, John
Minter Morgan, made the observation that he was the first to coin
the term competitive to describe the existing economic
system. The case for the originality of this work is further made
by Max Nettlau who
states: "[Thompson's] book, however, discloses his own
evolution; having started with a demand for the full product of
labour as well as the regulation of distribution, he ended up with
his own conversion to communism, that is, unlimited
distribution."

In 1827 fellow "Ricardian socialist" Thomas Hodgskin
published Labour Defended which also characterised the
appropriation of the lions share of the fruits of production by
landlord and capitalist as exploitation defrauding the worker of
the full product of their labour. However, Hodgskin proposed that
the road to economic justice for the labourer was through a
reformed competitive system. Thompson replied with Labor
Rewarded defending cooperative communism against Hodgskin's
unequal wages.

Feminism

Although he rejected the political and economic implications of
Malthus' essay on population, Thompson recognised that,
particularly in Ireland, unrestrained population growth did pose
the threat of rising poverty. As such he was like Bentham and Francis Place an
advocate of the benefits of contraception.
Thompson's development of a critique of the contemporary status of
women was most strongly influenced by his long-term close
friendship with Anna Doyle Wheeler. He had met
Wheeler while staying with Bentham and they moved in those
utilitarian circles that included James Mill. It was the publication of the
latter's "On Government" which called for the vote for men only,
that aroused the fervent opposition of both Wheeler and Thompson
and to the rebuttal in Appeal of One Half the Human
Race... (see Bibliography for full title).

Influence on cooperative
movement

Opposition to Robert
Owen

Thompson and others of the Cooperative movement have tended to be
somewhat unfairly subsumed under the political label of Owenism. In fact,
although his writings and social experiments at New Lanark had helped to
bring the cooperative movement together, many, Thompson included,
were critical of Owen's authoritarian and anti-democratic
tendencies. Thompson further distrusted Owen's courtship of rich
and powerful patrons, believing that the rich as a class could be
never be expected to be in favour of any project of emancipation
for the labouring poor as this would threaten their privilege. He
also believed in the necessity of the workers in any co-operative
community having eventual security of ownership of the community's
land and capital property. He gained a considerable following
within the cooperative movement for these positions and it was to
distinguish themselves from Owen's positions that this wing of the
movement began to adopt the label of "socialist or communionist"
(Letter to "The Cooperative Magazine", London, November 1827, cited
by OED as first documented use of socialist) rather than
"Owenist".

These differences led to open confrontation between Thompson and
Owen at the Third Cooperative Congress held in 1832 in London.
Owen, perhaps discouraged by the failure of his attempted community
at New Harmony,
maintained that it was necessary to wait for Government and Stock
Exchange support and investment into large scale communities.
Thompson and his supporters contended that they must move towards
establishing independent small scale communities based on the
movement's own resources. The argument was not resolved at that
congress and by the following one Thompson was unable to attend
probably as a result of the illness that was to lead to his death
in another five months.

Influence
on Karl Marx

Karl Marx had come
across Thompson's work on a visit to Manchester in 1845 and cites
it in passing in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) and also
in Capital itself. However the same can be said of other
of the proto-socialist political economists such as Thomas
Hodgskin, John Gray, John Francis Bray. It seems
surprising then, that the likes of Beatrice and Sidney
Webb would characterise Marx as "the illustrious disciple" of
Thompson and Hodgskin. Sentiments also echoed by the likes of Harold Laski and
other British historians of socialism. In this they were accepting
the earlier thesis in Anton Menger's Right to the Whole
Produce of Labour (1899), amalgamating all the aforementioned
into a homogeneous category of Ricardian socialists which obscured
the important differences between Thompson's communist critique of
Hodgskin's "market libertarian" position.

Bibliography

Thompson, William, An Inquiry into the Principles of the
Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; applied
to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth,
(Longman, Hurst Rees, Orme, Brown & Green: London), 1824.

Thompson, William, Appeal of One Half the Human Race,
Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain
Them in Political, and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery,
(Longman, Hurst Rees, Orme, Brown & Green: London), 1825.

Thompson, William, Labor Rewarded. The Claims of Labor and
Capital Conciliated: or, How to Secure to Labor the Whole Products
of Its Exertions, (Hunt and Clarke: London), 1827.

Thompson, William, Practical Directions for the Speedy and
Economical Establishment of Communities on the Principles of Mutual
Co-operation, United Possessions and Equality of Exertions and the
Means of Enjoyments, (Strange and E. Wilson: London),
1830.